The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #101088   Message #2353413
Posted By: Little Hawk
30-May-08 - 07:37 PM
Thread Name: BS: Popular Views on Obama
Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views on Obama
Yes, but you are simply confirming what I said as to how politicians use religion as a motivator for their wars. The real fight is over jurisdictional power and control over a geographical area and all the valuable material stuff that's in that area. Religion, like patriotism, like cultural identity, and like skin color, is used as an emotional motivator to get people to enlist and blow the hell out of other people whom they think are "different" in some way from themselves.

Religion is just one among many excuses for going to war. The Israelis and the Arabs are not really fighting over their religious differences...although many of the soldiers may imagine that they are. Jews and Arabs got along quite well there together in the same communities during many periods prior to the creation of Israel. They are fighting now over who gets to politically, militarily, and commercially control that area of land and all the benefits that accrue from that area of land...who gets to issue the orders...who gets to call the shots...who gets to run the government and armed forces. It has, ultimately, nothing to do with their religious beliefs, it has to do with which political group gets to have control of all the material STUFF in that area.

The religious fanatics who line up and enlist to kill and die are just individual people who've been duped by the big red herring I alluded to.